Feeling the Love
7th March 2021 by Helen Sanders. Posted under Employers
I love you.
And I don’t know how you do it.
This is what I heard from one of my clients this week.
Mind you, he also told me he was in love. Not with me. But thankfully with one of the candidates, I’d found for his growing business.
He asked also ‘How is it we’ve got to the candidates we have based on the advert that we put out there? Is that down to sheer luck? Is it the advert that attracted the right people or actually…’
and then he stopped.
He’d realised the reason I do what I do. I use my expertise to bring his company, his vision, the career opportunity to life for applicants who respond to the job adverts I write. It’s not just the quality and the words used in the advert that you put out there to attract candidates. It’s about having a recruitment partner on board who understands what the business needs.
The realisation that I’d given him what he needed and actually not what he’d asked for was then discussed. Yeap, that is also what I do. Good recruiters should do that as a matter of course, by the way.
What I’m saying is the advert is really crucial because you need to attract the right people, but quite often, especially if you’re a small business or you’re a start-up or the role, is much more than just what the job title says, it’s what happens as part of the process after they’ve applied.
Sometimes you need someone else, a middle man, or actually, a recruitment consultant, who can analyze and explore what type of personality, what sort of background and what sort of skillset really works for you as the business owner now and as your company grows.
Most recruiters and I’ve been one of them, will look at a job description given to them and say ‘Yes Mrs Client, you need an HR manager. Fantastic, I’ll go away and look for an HR Manager and I’ll come back to you in a few weeks with some candidates’.
However, I know have the confidence and experience to say;
‘Okay, talk to me about this HR manager vacancy.
Is it a new vacancy?
Has anyone ever done this role within your business before?
Oh, they have?
Brilliant.
Why is that HR manager moving on?
Has the job changed in any way from what that person was doing to what you now need the HR manager to be doing?
…. Or, no one’s been doing that role.
Brilliant.
No shoes to fill.
What you could need, therefore, is someone who is happy with making the role their own, someone who is happy to basically set their store out as your first HR manager’.
Granted it takes time and experience as a recruiter to be able to have these types of consultative discussions and consultations with our clients. It also takes some expertise to bridge that gap between what a company is telling you they need and what the market or talent pool can provide.
With that HR manager analogy, is it an HR manager that’s really needed or actually if there’s no one doing that role, perhaps an HR administrator might work. It depends on what the function of that person will be within the business; what is the need? What does this person need to do to be effective? Could it start as an HR Administrator and move into a Manager role with time, and as your business grows?
That’s where strong recruiters come into their own. They’re able to analyze what a hiring manager is telling them, what a company needs, and put in place the right person. The right person consists of the right skill set, but also the real cultural and personality fit within the team and within the business and within the vision of the business.
Actually, and this might be back-tracking slightly, you can teach skills. If you need an HR manager who has worked in an IT services company, let’s say, well how vital is the sector experience? Is it really important to have a strong HR manager who fits the company culture and is excited by your vision, and then you teach them about IT services, SAP, InfusionSoft, Xero, juggling or whatever it is that you’re trying to get them to have in terms of skillset.
Strong recruiters can really make a difference to your business, especially if you got a vacancy for someone who doesn’t fit the ‘norm’. Maybe it’s your third employee in your company. Quite often that person has to be Mrs. X, but they have to be Mrs. Y as well, or, in this situation, like an HR manager, actually a really strong HR administrator would work, given what the business needs this person to do and what the function of the role is.
If you feel that perhaps a conversation with an experienced recruitment consultant would help you, who wholly understands how to get into the head of a hiring manager, of a business owner, of an entrepreneur if you feel that would be useful, why not call me.
As we head into March and April, it is always a crazy time as the days get longer, people feel better about life (especially as we start to see an end to the pandemic lockdowns). This usually means adding to our team to free us up to do more of the core work we need to do to grow the business. I get it. I’m a business owner too.
Now, where can I find a recruiter who can get inside my head and sort out what I need to help me grow my business …
7th March 2021 by Helen Sanders. Posted under Employers Tags: client feedback, recruiting the right people, recruitment
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